Got this at a New York college bookstore in the late 60’s. Some of the stories I’ve read and re-read over the years. Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (still don’t know how to pronounce Mtsensk) is one. Seems to anticipate American crime novels like the Postman Always Rings Twice, though loads better. Very up front with female sexual desire. The other stories seem to be, one way or the other, haunted by the anxiety of death. But in this story, it’s just matter of fact – it is what it is. Crime (3 murders), punishment (no soul searching or remorse), supernatural (cats, floating heads, pike & perch). I agree with the editor that there’s something incredibly compelling about Katerina Izmaylova. Maybe it’s the single-mindedness.

The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. May have read this for the first time. The coat takes on a life of its own, absorbing the poor owner’s soul. Gives a sense of what ownership means to a person who has had very little his whole life.

A Lear of the Steppes by Ivan Turgenev. Read his Sportsman’s Sketches years ago; this one takes place in the same milieu. The focus on the “Lear” character, Martyn Harlov, centers on estate planning and death (something I can identify with). Fooling yourself that you can somehow control your fate, and that you know the people closest to you.

Master and Man & The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. The latter is a chestnut, read on multiple occasions. Probably the editor included Master & Man (which he doesn’t see as entirely successful) because his choice of Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband conflicted with another collection issued by Anchor. Master & Man is told in the simple style of some of T.’s semi-parable stories, though it turns out rather ironically. There’s an explicit parable when Vasily Andreyitch and his man Nikita are caught in a snowstorm. They stop at a village dwelling for respite, and, by the fire, the villagers bemoan the breakup of families because of economic circumstances. One of them, a youth & former schoolboy, tells a story (from one of his schoolbooks) of a teaching moment when students try unsuccessfully to break a bunch of branches, but only succeed by separating each branch. When master and man get lost in the blizzard as they continue on their journey, the two cling together, as in the parable, but one is frozen solid, unbreakable, while the other survives. The bond is broken through sacrifice.

Found Ivan Ilyich (the story) to be rather misanthropic in tone. T. seems to have great animus toward Ilyich, who appears to have done a decent enough career as a judge, and his colleagues are made to seem quite heartless, but T. seems to be expecting a higher degree of empathy than is warranted. At the same time, the unsentimental description of the anger and the pain of I.I.—I’m guessing he has some kind of cancer -- is a facet of the author’s integrity and truthfulness. Pain and death aren’t generally noble. I believe his worldview at this point in his writing career was not all that different from Andre Yefimitch in the Chekov story Ward No. 6, and in the introduction the editor reads the Chekov story as a sort of riposte to the Tolstoy perspective. However, Yefimitch’s worldview is from his reading, Tolstoy has the skill to make his own worldview seem realized in the person of his dying subject.

Ward No. 6. Read this a couple of times. As I grow older, more and more I see myself in Andrei Yefimitch. Just a part of me, I hope. “Once prisons and asylums exist, someone must inhabit them,” says Yefimitch to his paranoid patient, anticipating Michel Foucault and his own fate.

A word on the Introduction. Randall Jarrell wrote two introductions for Anchor. The one for The Anchor Book of Stories is a masterpiece. This one, less so. He wrote a brilliant essay on Walt Whitman which consisted largely of quotations from the poet, and he uses the technique here, but Russian prose in translation is not the same as poetry, and his obiter dicta while often striking and right, seem to stop at the sheer magic of the narrative fictions, and no further. ( )